//------------------------------//
// Let Me Count All The Ways In Which This Is Stupid 
// Story: Not The Hero 
// by alarajrogers 
//------------------------------//

I have returned! No worse for wear, this time, thankfully. Everything in perfect working order, including my tail and my level of intelligence (I think... though I suppose that if I'd been turned remarkably dense again, how would I know?) I'm sitting back with a glass of lime spaghetti and a plate of bean soda, relaxing after a hard day of being evil. Actually most of what I did today wasn't particularly evil, though I suspect the Seventh Element of Stupidity thinks I'm being evil at every moment of every day with every single thing I do, including my trips to the toilet. (To be fair, most ponies who have to come in to use a toilet after I've just been would agree with him about the evilness of my bathroom breaks, but I digress.) 

I spent most of my day resetting the Panauricon, planting listening spells all over Ponyville, and a few crystal eyes. (I don't use real eyes anymore ever since Luna found one and stepped on it back in the day. That was over a thousand years ago and I can still remember the extreme levels of ow that produced.) Then I went searching for potential allies by attempting to identify ponies, or other beings, who might have had negative interactions with the Bearers and their families. Found two con artists, an arrogant showmare, a griffin distinguishable from the others only by the fact that she ever voluntarily spent time around ponies and not by her extraordinarily low opinion of them since that's standard griffin issue, a noble stallion adopted by Celestia as a nephew, and two bratty little fillies. There are probably some others, but this is a good start.

I'm thinking about pulling out the old Elements of Disharmony. Given the Seventh Element's keen intellectual capacity, he's likely to see that as a genuine Evil Plan and not as what it would be, a deliciously chaotic distraction. Celestia could tell him how useless the Elements of Disharmony actually are, but I'll bet she won't, because she defers to him. My splendid orderly nemesis, my beautiful enemy, my proud and powerful Princess of the Sun, glorious and devastating and oh so cruel in her kindness... and she lets a human barely out of childhood tell her what to think. Oh, Celestia. I'd cry for you and what he's done to you, if you hadn't emptied me of tears for you, or anypony, millennia ago. The thing about the Elements of Disharmony that every pony who's faced them, and more than a few chaos avatars who've tried to use them, forgets is that disharmony can't work together. So you put together your Evil League of Evil to take up the Elements of Disharmony and oppose the Elements of Harmony, gather them all together, and they immediately start bickering with each other. And they won't stop long enough to actually fight the Elements of Harmony. One on one, if you wind one up and send her off against her corresponding Element, she might actually win, because individual Elements of Harmony are weaker without their partners, and individual Elements of Disharmony are strongest when alone. But put them all together and they'll fight with each other more than they'll fight the Harmony Elements. 

So as a part of a carefully planned and coordinated attack on the Elements, in a group, they are worse than useless; you'd be better off hiring mercenaries. But as part of a wonderfully chaotic show of fire and motion, a bit of the old razzle dazzle to misdirect your opponents and make them think you're actually enacting an Evil Plan when in fact you're sitting back with popcorn and chaos-tan lotion ready to soak in some disharmonious rays, get a few laughs, and cover up what you're actually doing, they're marvelous. The only problem is, I forget where I put them. What? Spend a thousand years in stone and see if you remember where you left your keys! I'm sure it'll come back to me.

Anyway. Reset the Panauricon, identify some potential bearers for the Elements of Disharmony, and also, I stole a foal's ice cream, just to make it clear that I'm playing the villain role like I'm supposed to. Maybe that was a bit much, but honestly, this guy is so incredibly dumb, I'm afraid that if I just work in the background on some Evil Plan or other, he'll get frustrated with the inactivity and force me to show myself so he can humiliate me and cut me up again. I'm really not looking forward to facing him directly, though sooner or later I suspect he'll make me. If I can put off that day by stealing a foal's ice cream, then by all means, the ice cream shall be mine! Though really it was quite boring. Strawberry flavored, euw. Not even strawberry banana or strawberry with sprinkles. I had to load it up with potato chips and salsa to make it flavorful enough for my palate. 

Then I came back here, to continue the sad, sordid tale of my encounters with The Most Uninteresting Man In Equestria.

...You know I really don't want to do this. The part I need to write about next is so unendurably humiliating, I am sorely tempted to just stop writing this thing. I mean, honestly, is there a point? If I win, I'll destroy this journal and all these words will go to waste; if I lose, who's going to read this, really? And what good would it do them if they did? I sorely doubt some mere unimportant pony leading a perfectly ordinary life is going to be able to destroy a creature who warps reality to make himself come up roses every time, and all the important ponies are already under the spell. Who could even make use of this journal if I'm defeated?

Well, if I die... there'll be a chaos avatar after me, and Human McHumanson won't know of his or her existence. This document might be of use to whoever that is, assuming they know how to read (this is not always a given with chaos avatars.) And while Princess Pink Lovey and her hubby think my nemesis is the greatest thing since sliced bread after he annihilated the Changelings and saved them both, they aren't under his control to nearly the same extent as the Bearers and the older princesses. And if I didn't mistake what I saw -- and when it comes to disharmony I rarely do -- Twilight's pet dragon is rather miserable with this whole situation. He's under the spell as much as any of the others, compelled to practically worship the Seventh Element... who is ignoring his existence, as nearly as I can tell. And apparently Prince Blueface or whatever his name is quite despises the Bearers' new pal; I was shocked at first, and hopeful that perhaps somepony else could resist, but no, Bluecrab is also a designated villain, like I am, and that's why He Who Shall Be Loved is allowing Blueballs to hate him. Still, that's a potential ally for me, one with the actual power to do something... not something that will help, of course, because Bluebeard doesn't have anywhere near the kind of power he'd need to fight this guy, but again, fire and motion, and possibly somepony who could make use of this journal if I'm defeated. 

So I suppose there's no help for it. I have to write this damn thing, as accurately as I can remember. How boring! But ... I really wish you could hear my dramatic sigh here, it's one of my better ones... this isn't a fight I chose. There's no guarantee it'll entertain me, and if it stops being fun I still have to fight. I hate this. But I don't have a choice.

Onward, then, to the tale of my first humiliation at this creature's hands.





The first time I lured the Bearers into the hedge maze, I was fairly sure they wouldn't be able to resist my power, not for the most part anyway. There had always been a few, but generally they'd been forewarned; nopony had encountered my power in a thousand years, and Celestia had done a terrible job of preparing these six for my capabilities. I thought perhaps one might resist (though I was wrong about which one; I'd expected Pinkie Pie might possibly have greater resistance than she had, considering the connection between Laughter and Chaos -- oh, Harmony, you may try to claim it for your own, but Laughter is really mine and we both know it -- and I never expected the little yellow pegasus who shrieked in fear at my picture would be the one who I'd need to use direct magic inversion on.) But I assumed, correctly, that most of them would fall fairly easily. 

You see, the trick is that you get them to open the door by being friendly. Concerned. Helpful. Shakespony might have said "one can smile, and smile, and still be a villain", but most ponies can't comprehend this; intellectually they know I'm their enemy, but when I speak to them soothingly and I commiserate with them on the greatest anguish they hadn't known they had, it confuses them, and part of their mind takes what I have to say as friendly advice. It's hardly their fault, poor things; they're herd animals. They're so dependent on harmony and the opinions of others, they can't resist a smiling villain. And just as telling a pony not to think of a swordfish causes them to do so, telling a pony about the fears they didn't know they had makes those fears come to life in their mind, and they'll do anything to block them out, including letting my influence in. I can straight-up brainwash a pony, but that's cheating; it's so, so much better when I get them to open the door themselves than when I break it down.

But most ponies can resist me if I go after them a second time using the same attack. So when I'm in my right mind, I'd never try to discord the same pony the same way twice. It's not like I'd ever have to, either. Before ponies named my patented mind-alteration technique after me, I called it unbalancing; it's the process of altering the balance of emotional traits within a pony's mind. I can make a pony so gullible that they'll believe the sky has always been green, or so paranoid that they're convinced all their friends and family are impostors. I can take essentially any trait that exists within them, and either increase or decrease it. I don't have to make it be the personality trait they're best known for... though it's easiest, and oftentimes most fun, to do it that way, and against the Elements of Harmony I thought doing it that way would maximize their inability to harmonize with their own elements. But against these neurotic mares there were any number of angles of attack. They appeared to have a bizarre attachment to this human; if I amplified that to a ridiculous degree I could make them insanely jealous of each other, and tear him apart (possibly literally, but more likely just emotionally) in their conflicts with each other. I could make them so calm and relaxed, they wouldn't have any energy to fight me. I could amplify their Elemental traits ludicrously, so Applejack really would tear their friendship apart being brutally honest and Rarity would drive herself to a sickbed giving her time and energy away and Fluttershy would be incapable of hurting me as much as she would be incapable of hurting anyone else. There were any number of things I could have done!

So this time, of course, I presented each of them with the exact same temptations I'd offered last time. The temptations that they would almost certainly be able to resist, having encountered them before. And they resisted me, of course, because these were the exact same temptations. So I discorded them by pure magical force, the way I had to do to Fluttershy the first time around.

No, really. I cheated. Just like that. I invited them to play a game, and then I just used brute force on them anyway. If I was going to do that why didn't I send them to the moon? Why didn't I hide the Elements in Tartarus? This wasn't any kind of game at all! I'm all right with playing a game that's rigged in my favor -- honestly aren't they all? -- but to not even try to play within the rules I'd set for myself... where's the fun in that? Where's the challenge?

And yet none of this occurred to me until it was over.

I had just finished convincing Rainbow Dash, again, that Cloudsdale would plummet like the House of Usher without her awesome and personal attention to saving it, again, when the human staggered into the clearing we were in, gasping.

"Rainbow! Rainbow Dash!  You have to come with me!  The others-- they need our help! They've been discorded!"

I'd shrunk back into the shadows to watch the interaction. I wasn't disappointed. Rainbow Dash said, "Help ‘em yourself, dweeb -- I've got things I gotta do."

"No!" He grabbed her wing before she could take off. "You can't leave! Don't you remember Discord's stupid rule? If anyone uses their wings or their magic, he wins!"

(I didn't actually take their wings or horns this time. I just told them that if they used them, they'd forfeit the game, and Luna and the Elements would remain in my custody. And I thought I was being creative! Mixing things up! Oh, the humiliation.)

"Yeah, well, just because you don't have any of your kind here in Equestria, the same isn't true for me, Anon," Rainbow Dash said. "I've got a whole city of pegasi to save, and they're my kind! Not like you! So that's where my loyalties are. See ya!"

As she took off and he broke down in an anguished scream, I could only think, His name is Anon? His name is Anon? Really?

I couldn't control myself. I broke down laughing. 

Anon -- no, seriously, that was what she called him -- turned on me. "What have you done to Rainbow Dash?" he shouted at me. "You corrupted her, didn't you? Just like you corrupted all of them!"

I got control of myself back enough to talk. What I meant to say was "Your name is really Anon? Seriously?" Instead what I found myself saying was "You should see the look on your face! Priceless!"

For a moment I was confused. I remembered enough to know that that hadn't been what I meant to say, but I completely lost track of what I had meant to say, or in fact what I'd just been laughing about. Before I could spend any time thinking about it, though, he grabbed me by the neck -- which actually hurt. I've been grabbed by the neck quite a lot in my life. It doesn't usually hurt. Generally, in fact, very little can hurt me. "Fix it, Discord!" he snarled at me. "Put them back the way they were!"

"Or what?" I pulled myself free of him, snickering. "You'll posture heroically some more?" 

"No," he said. "They're my friends, and they're under my protection. For I am the Seventh Element of Harmony, Protection, and I will defeat you!"

I gaped at him. Even in my impaired state, I knew what he'd just said was total nonsense, and not the fun kind, either. "There is no Seventh Element of Harmony!"

"None that you knew of, villain," he said. "It could only be activated by the touch of a human, and I'm the first one to enter Equestria in thousands of years! Longer than even you have existed!"

I pride myself on my ability to say things to my opponents that make them splutter, unable to figure out what part of my statement they want to refute first and tangling up their tongue with indecision and rage. I could say with equal pride, before that day, that no one had ever been able to do it to me. I suppose I can still say no one has ever been able to do it to me on purpose, the way I do it to others; this bozo actually believed every incredibly dumb thing he'd just said. I spluttered, completely unable to think of which stupid part of his several-layer-cake of stupidity I wanted to smash first.

While I was spluttering, he took a white gem out from under his shirt, a pendant on a chain. The top of the pendant was shaped vaguely like a golden hilt, with the chain running through it, and the shape of the gem, with the hilt-like fixture it was set in, made it look rather like a small sword. He held it tightly in both hands, and it glowed, shining through the skin and making his hands look blood red. 

I backed away. I could feel Harmony magic radiating from it, but Harmony magic that seemed twisted and wrong somehow... not that I'm an expert on Harmony, but this felt... predatory. Unpleasantly like the feeling behind Order's power, actually -- the sense that the power wanted to crush anything that opposed it, rather than what I usually felt from Harmony, which was the desire to force you to agree. Violence, rather than mind control. But this wasn't Order; there was too much chaos in it, too much passion. It was Harmony, but the wrong Harmony.

The first time I saw the Tree of Harmony, it scared the pants off me, or would have if I'd been wearing pants at the time. But then, I'd been a child. I've faced and fought that damned Tree and its offshoots and partners many times. I knew it too well to be afraid of it any longer. Concerned, yes; wary, certainly; but afraid? No. 

This, I was afraid of. This was Harmony gone very, very wrong.

A suit of light armor materialized around him -- mail shirt and skirt, gauntlets, and a helmet that was hardly more than a hat -- all white and glowing faintly. The gem transformed in his hands into a sword, and he swung it to point straight into the air. "Discord! With the power of Protection, and to save my friends, I will destroy you!"

I shrieked like a little filly and teleported.

I didn't go far, just to the other side of the hedge. But then I heard him screaming. "Coward! Run all you want, Discord! I'll find the other Elements, and Princess Luna, and then I'll destroy you!"

I am not normally in the habit of being terrified of anything just because I don't understand how it's possible. After all, I'm the Lord of the Impossible; if someone else manages to pull off something I don't understand, well, that's my game and I'm not going to let them beat me at it. But for some reason I was completely panicked. "It can't be," I started mumbling to myself. "That power... he can't be... how can he be the Seventh Element?"

His sword came slicing through the hedge next to me. I yelped and barely dodged out of the way. "I can hear you, you monster!" the human shouted, lunging through the hole he'd just cut in the hedge. "You messed with Princess Luna, you messed with my friends, and I'm going to make you pay!"

I was half-paralyzed with terror. A thousand things I could have done to block him, counter him, escape him, and I did none of them -- just stumbled backward clumsily, barely dodging the thrusts of the sword. "Look, can't we talk about this?" I said desperately. "You don't want to kill me, you'll never find out where Luna and the Elements are if you do!"

"I'm confident we'll find them! If I kill you, your spell on Princess Luna will fade, and she can help us find the Elements!"

"And what if you're wrong? What if I left Luna in a trap, so the moment she wakes up and tries to get out of bed, the whole place goes up like a nuke? You are one of those humans from a time period where you know what a nuke is, right?"

He lunged at me again, and I tripped over a fountain wall and fell into the fountain. The human jumped into the fountain and had his sword to my throat before I could get up. "Tell me you didn't, monster," he growled. "Tell me you didn't bring a nuclear bomb to Equestria!"

This was the first time I'd seen him react with anything that looked like fear. I smirked at him. "Well, why not?" I said. "You're here, why not some other examples of humanity's finest work?"

The tip of the sword pricked my skin, and I felt a wave of disruption crash over my magic, wrecking my control. My eyes went wide. I know, I make control of chaos look easy, and I look dead sexy doing it too, but controlling chaos magic is actually very, very hard. That's why so few creatures use it, despite the fact that it's more powerful than either harmonic magic or dark magic. If you know what you're doing, harmonic magic always does what you want it to, and dark magic isn't any harder to control than harmonic magic -- it just makes it harder to control yourself when you use it, since the more you give in to your most negative emotions, the more powerful your dark magic becomes. But chaos magic does what it wants to do. A lot of what I do is essentially the equivalent of using magic to roll dice, then taking note of the effect I got and running with it. With my power disrupted, my connection to chaos itself jangled and confused, I knew I couldn't reliably get any effect I wanted -- I could try telekinesis and get a bunch of flowers, I could attempt to teleport and instead turn myself inside out. I wasn't powerless, far from it, but with the incredible range of what my powers can do, being unable to control them at all meant that if I invoked my power to try to escape or fight back, I might destroy myself or aid my enemy or just end up looking really stupid. "I didn't!" I said, panicking completely. "I was joking! There aren't any nukes in Equestria!"

He didn't ease up. "Tell me where Princess Luna is, creature! Where have you hidden her?"

I looked up into his eyes and realized I was well and truly screwed. If I didn't tell him, he'd kill me. The disruption to my power meant that I couldn't reliably invoke my magic to heal or transform my way out of whatever damage he might do me -- with my magic I'm nearly invulnerable, but without it, I'm flesh and blood like anything else. But if I did tell him... I was afraid he'd kill me anyway. He didn't look sane. The psychotic hatred in his eyes, the fact that his sword was apparently an Element of Harmony except one perverted into a tool of destruction and war, the fact that he was human and humans are aggressive little monsters... there was bloodlust in his face, and it wasn't going to be sated by my cooperation. 

As my mind was racing, trying to come up with a way out of this, I heard Twilight Sparkle's voice. "Anon, what are you doing?"

"I'm trying to get some answers out of this misshapen monster!" 

I wanted to make a wiseass comment about that, but refrained, since there was still a sword poking me in the throat. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know, if you back off! How do I know that you won't just kill me after I answer your questions?" I said.

"Anon would never do that!" Twilight said. "He's honorable, unlike you!"

"Then I want his word of honor that if I tell him where Princess Luna and the Elements are, he won't hurt me."

He grinned coldly at me. "I'll swear not to kill you, Discord. I won't make any promises about not hurting you."

I really did not like the sound of that. "Fine. Get that thing off my neck and give me your word that you won't kill me."

"And how do I know you won't run away the moment I sheathe my sword?"

I rolled my eyes. "You're still standing on top of my neck. Where did you expect me to go?"

"Release my friends from your spell and I'll sheathe my sword."

I wasn't falling for that. "Give me your word of honor that if I release your friends, you will get that sword out of my face, and that once I tell you where I hid Princess Luna and the Elements, you won't kill me."

He poked me harder. The part of my neck he was poking with the sword was directly under my chin, since the rest of my neck was underwater in the fountain, so I couldn't see, but I felt moisture and I thought I might have just started bleeding. "You don't have room to negotiate, Discord!"

"Please, just give him your word," Twilight said. "Please, Anon. You can always take it out on him later if he lies, but right now, our friends and Princess Luna are what's important!"

He growled at me, his eyes narrowing. "All right. I accept your terms."

"Go get your friends," I said. "They should all be released now." The truth was, of course, that I'd lost hold of that spell the moment he disrupted my power, so his friends were all already free.

Twilight used her magic to send up a flare, and the others gathered quickly. The last one to arrive was Rainbow Dash, who had apparently been halfway to Cloudsdale before my power wore off her. 

"Anon! I am so, so sorry I was so cruel to you," Rarity sobbed. I'd say overdramatically, but if you know Rarity, you know that went without saying.

The others all had similarly hysterical sappy apologies to make to Anon (if I hadn't still been half terrorized out of my mind, I'd probably have had a much harder time not snickering at that name). He wasn't paying attention to me anymore, he'd sheathed his sword and he was entirely preoccupied with the mares hugging him and sobbing out frantic apologies.

I took a deep breath. I had enough control of my power back to safely teleport. 

So I did, straight up into the air, about thirty heads above them all. Rainbow Dash could have reached me easily, except that, with my power back, I was able to attach a cuff attached to a heavy iron ball to her hind leg, so she couldn't launch. Twilight or Rarity could get that off her within a minute, but it gave me the time to do what I needed to do.

"Well, this little adventure has been delightful, but since Rainbow Crash down there used her wings, the game's been forfeit for some time. So I suppose you'll all have to find the Elements, and Luna, without my help. Best of luck to you!"

"Discord!" Anon (can I actually write that without snickering now?... no, not quite) shouted up at me. "You swore you'd tell us where they are!"

"Oh no, I made you swear not to kill me if I told you. I never promised I actually would tell you."

"I'll kill you!"

"You'll have to catch me first," I said, and before he could pull yet another impossible magical superpower out of his large intestine, I continued with, "Ta-ta!" and vanished.





Minutes after I got back here, I was reeling. Nothing that had happened today made sense. Yes, I know, I know, where's the fun in making sense, do you know how many times he's made me say that? It's like, when I'm dealing with him, all my tricks and quips from my earlier encounter with the Bearers start repeating in my head until I actually use them.

The truth is, Chaos is not about nonsense and never has been. It is not about meaninglessness or true randomness. Well, okay, pure chaos is about those things, but I'm not here for pure chaos. I am not an emanation of the force of entropy (which isn't synonymous with chaos anyway), I am not a personification of an abstract concept. Chaos existed before I did and it will exist long after. 

I am here because magic needs chaos. And because life needs chaos, and magic has the power to crush the chaos out of life, thus crushing life and magic itself. I exist, or more precisely my role exists, to maintain a balance that allows magic and life to co-exist. And I'm outnumbered. My partners/opponents in this endless game, my opposite parties, are Order and Harmony. It's two against one, but then it might have to be. In the immortal words of Rainbow Dash, I am just that awesome. 

But that means I am here for the chaos that life generates, and that life thrives on. And that is not the chaos of meaninglessness. That is the chaos of so many different meanings, a pony cannot make them all out within the cacophony. My name means the sound of too many sounds, conflicting with each other, drowning each other out (as well as meaning the single note that doesn't fit, conflict, and disharmony itself.) 

Everything that happens has a reason; everything that happens fits into a pattern. When there are so many reasons and so many patterns that no pony can figure them out enough to predict what will happen next with any certainty, that is chaos. Chaos isn't meaninglessness, it's complexity. Ponies have a hard time with this concept. One little thing goes wrong, they start declaring that the world has become total nonsense! To be brutally honest, when I first made that quip, Celestia was being an idiot, complaining that it made no sense for the Elements to be gone when she knew I was loose, she knew I knew they had the power to stop me, and she knew I'm much more powerful than she is and an expert at breaking any sort of magical lock. It actually made so much sense for the Elements to be gone that I had been half tempted to leave paste replicas of them in there to see if Celestia would be surprised to see them still there, when I took them.

In this case, though, nothing about this made any sense because there were so many directions in which everything was wrong. To begin with, there is no Seventh Element of Harmony. I've fought Harmony long enough that I would know this, and prior to that, I have the knowledge of the chaos avatars before me. As far back as Chaos and Harmony have warred with each other to maintain the balance on this world, there has never been a Seventh Element. Secondly, the fundamental nature of Harmony and its greatest weakness is that all the pieces must be present; one missing piece of Harmony and there is no Harmony. So if there had been a Seventh Element, none of the occasions where six elements were in use would actually have worked. Thirdly, Protection has nothing to do with Harmony! I am no expert on Harmony, as I've said, but that much I know. Harmony is about working together; Protection is about working alone for the benefit of others. All of the Elements of Harmony except Magic are reciprocal; one is supposed to both give and get those traits to maintain harmony. Be honest, and get honesty from those around you. Be kind, and get kindness from those around you. Blah blah blah harmonysauce. Protection isn't reciprocal; it's extended from a protector to a protectee. Watching each others' back isn't the platonic ideal of Protection; Protection is ideally extended from the strong to the weak, and the weak do not have the power to extend it back. 

And fourthly, humans have nothing to do with Equestria. It makes just as much sense to say that humans can activate a particular power of Equestria as it does to say grey aliens can. Humans are an amusing race, and overrepresented in the multiverse, and I greatly enjoy them, but they are not part of our world and never were. It's certainly possible that on coming to Equestria a human could develop magic, because their world had magic once and lost it, so the capacity to do magic is probably there in the genome someplace. But to develop a power that is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the balance of magic? As Big Macintosh might say, nope. 

Then there was the violence of his power, the nature of Harmony magic that could disrupt and kill. Harmony does not, normally, disrupt my magic... exactly. Harmony imposes a will on chaotic magic that turns it controlled and orderly, forcing it to conform to the will of the Harmony wielder, and when this happens, I lose control of the magic because I don't do harmonic magic. Disrupting chaos ought to be technically impossible, and certainly, disrupting chaos with harmony sounds like someone didn't read the dictionary definitions of either one. 

There was something very wrong here. So I went forth to do some research. 

And next time, I'll regale you all with the thrilling tale of my research, but right now I think I would rather watch paint dry. I am so bored. Cooped up in this cave, staying out of the way of ponies because while they're as much fun as they ever were, they have a would-be protector who wants me dead and has demonstrated rather too much potential to accomplish his goals for my taste. I have to go do something, I'm miserable in here. 

I wonder if dragons are as easy to annoy as they used to be?